Recently, we were honored to host Petra Dierkes-Thrun of Stanford University to discuss "Oscar Wilde's Afterimages: Oscar Wilde and the Commodification of Queer Culture." After her lecture, Dierkes-Thrun co-hosted a fast-paced, interactive workshop on MOOCs and online teaching and learning for the students of Duke's PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge.

The FHI, HASTAC, PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge, and Program in the Study of Sexualities at Duke are pleased to sponsor a Presentation and a Workshop by Modernism and Queer Theory Scholar Petra Dierkes-Thrun of Stanford University.

Oscar Wilde has meant different things to different people since the late 19th century, but probably nowhere has his legacy been felt more strongly than in the queer and feminist community and associated scholarship since the 1980s. Today, Wilde is considered a prime ancestral node within the genealogy of queer aesthetics and eroticism of Western culture, due in large part to the many 20th-century writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, and cultural theorists (queer and straight) who have creatively reimagined and critically examined his life and works. But as with all powerful myths of origin, the ongoing story about Wilde as the queer ancestor probably tells us more about our own desires and fears, and our own culture, than about the historical Oscar Wilde and Victorian culture. This talk will deal with queer and feminist afterimages of Wilde since the 1980s (specifically, of Salomé and The Picture of Dorian Gray) that both spiritualize and commodify the signifier Wilde for our own present: their utopian and material impulses, their sale and consumption in queer and mainstream culture alike. Approached from a Foucaultian perspective that regards fantasies of transgression and perversity as constitutive rather than oppositional elements of a larger cultural network, examining these afterimages of Wilde becomes an important way of engaging with an imagined and desired past that continues to speak to us in beautiful and seductive tongues.

This workshop was geared toward Duke PhD Lab students but is open to the public. Dierkes-Thrun called upon her own experience integrating technology into instruction, joined by Duke Professors Cathy Davidson and David Bell, co-directors of Duke's new PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge.